On curiosity, discernment, and that beautiful pause between “What is this?” and “What do I think about it?”
There is a delicious little moment between wonder and belief.
You encounter something unfamiliar: a word you’ve never heard, practice you don’t recognise, an idea that makes something inside you lean closer – or quietly recoil.
And there it is.
The Pause of Curiosity.
Although, if I’m being entirely truthful, sometimes the pause lasts approximately three seconds and sounds less like quiet contemplation and more like “What the fuck is that?”. Because Curiosity often doesn’t arrive wearing flowing robes and carrying a grimoire filled with mystical answers; sometimes she arrives with eyebrows raised so high they’ve become entangled in her braid.
Sometimes Curiosity sends you down a Google rabbit hole. Sometimes you buy a book. Sometimes you ask someone who knows more than you. Sometimes you emerge three hours later knowing considerably more about medieval folk practices than you intended and having completely forgotten what you originally went looking for. And sometimes you simply shrug and get on with your day.
There is no correct ceremony for wonder.
Perhaps the important bit is simply leaving enough room for “I don’t know” before “therefore it must be nonsense.” Because “I don’t understand this” and “this isn’t true” do not carry the same weight. Neither do “this feels meaningful to me” and “this must, therefore, be a golden truth.”
Somewhere between those realms of meaning lies a rather interesting patch of ground.
Let’s have a rummage.
The Cost of the Sacred
Ah. Money. The subject that can make a perfectly pleasant conversation suddenly develop teeth.
We’ve already established that commerce isn’t inherently the enemy.
A handmade rune set can be sacred. So can the stones you collected on a walk.
An oracle deck created by artists, writers, printers, and craftspeople deserves to be paid for. And you can scribble your own symbols onto scraps of paper and pull them from an old biscuit tin.
Both count.
Books cost money. Artists deserve paying. Makers deserve paying. Teachers deserve paying. Materials cost money. Skill has value.
And beautiful things are allowed to be beautiful simply because beauty brings us joy.
But somewhere in all this talk about ethical buying, fair exchange, and supporting makers, there is something else worth saying:
You don’t actually need any of it.
You don’t need the ritual kit.
You don’t need an altar that looks as though it has been art-directed for Instagram.
You don’t need twelve crystals lined up according to somebody else’s instructions.
You don’t need a particular deck.
You don’t need the expensive candle, the carved box, the athame, the cauldron, seventeen herbs you’ve never heard of, or a tiny glass bottle labelled FULL MOON MANIFESTATION ELIXIR.
Want them?
Wonderful.
Love them?
Wonderful.
Find meaning in choosing, collecting, making, and working with them?
Also wonderful.
But wanting a tool and needing a tool are very different things.
Human beings found the sacred long before same-day delivery.
A kitchen bowl can hold an offering.
A pebble can mark an intention.
Your finger can trace a circle.
Water is water whether it lives in an antique silver chalice or the mug you use for your morning tea.
And sometimes there isn’t an object at all.
There is you.
Your attention.
Your intention.
Your relationship with whatever you understand as sacred.
Your hands. Your breath. Your voice. Your silence.
You are the altar, baby.
The tools are optional. The aesthetic is optional. The expensive kit is optional.
Nothing you can buy will make you more magical, more worthy, more intuitive, or more sacred.
Buy beautiful things because you love them. Use tools because they help you connect, focus, create or remember. Make things yourself. Improvise. Borrow. Go without.
The magic isn’t hiding in the accessories.
The magic is you. And has been all along.
Perhaps the loveliest tools are the ones that help us remember that – rather than convincing us we cannot practise without them.
And that is where money becomes interesting again.
Not because somebody dared sell us something beautiful. But because sometimes we’re sold the idea that we are incomplete without buying it. And that’s a very different transaction.
When fear, urgency, or spiritual inadequacy enter the exchange, when you’re told the universe brought you here – and apparently the universe also accepts Klarna, that’s where commerce can begin to slide towards something else.
And Then There’s the Feeling
There is still the little hmm.
The raised eyebrow.
The prickle.
The pull.
The inexplicable urge to lean closer.
Or back away.
I don’t think we need to turn that into homework; I certainly don’t sit there conducting an internal audit every time something makes me go “what the fuck?”
Usually I look it up.
And then I look something else up.
And then something contradicts the first thing, so I look that up.
Perhaps I buy a book. Perhaps I talk to somebody. Perhaps I find an entirely different rabbit hole and disappear into that for approximately 384 solar returns instead.
Eventually, I might have an opinion.
Or I might simply know more than I did before.
Sometimes I still think it’s absolute bullshit.
Sometimes I discover that the thing I initially side-eyed has a history, meaning, or context I knew absolutely nothing about.
Sometimes I still don’t believe in it, but I understand why somebody else might.
And sometimes I come away with more questions than I started with.
And I rather like that outcome.
Because discernment doesn’t have to be an eight-point mental checklist. Sometimes it’s simply giving Curiosity enough time to interfere with your first impression.
Before We Decide
Perhaps discernment isn’t about becoming harder to fool. Perhaps it isn’t about becoming harder at all.
Maybe it’s about remaining willing to look. To hold wonder without immediately turning it into certainty. To hold scepticism without immediately turning it into contempt.
To say “I don’t know” without feeling an urgent need to fix that. Or to say “I don’t know” and immediately disappear down a rabbit hole because now you absolutely must fucking know.
There is no prize for reaching certainty first.
And there is certainly no age at which we’re handed a gilded certificate declaring: Congratulations. You now know everything.
I once came across a lovely line attributed to Dulce Ruby:
“The beautiful thing about life is that we will never reach an age where we are too old to learn.”
I have absolutely no idea who Dulce Ruby is. Which, frankly, feels wonderfully appropriate. Because now I have something else to look up.
But the sentiment is hardly new. As the great and mystical sage of our time, Alanis Morissette once sang:
“You live, you learn.”
Quite.
We live. We learn. We discover that something we confidently believed ten years ago was spectacularly wrong. We encounter things our younger selves had never heard of. We change our minds. We acquire better information. Occasionally we realise our parents were right about something and require several business days to recover.
We are never finished, and perhaps that’s one of the loveliest things about being alive.
There will always be another rabbit hole.
Another book.
Another person who knows something we don’t.
Another strange collection of words appearing on a Saturday morning and making us ask: “What the actual fuckity fuck is that?”
And off we go again.
We’re all wandering around with incomplete maps.
Sometimes we learn.
Sometimes we change our minds.
Sometimes we find something beautiful exactly where we expected nonsense.
Sometimes we peel back something beautiful and discover there was never much holding it up at all.
Maybe that’s what we’re really noticing – not whether something is polished or handmade. Expensive or improvised. Ancient or new. Elaborate or almost painfully simple.
But whether there’s something underneath it.
Something with roots.
Meaning.
Context.
Care.
Integrity.
Or whether, once the rain comes, we discover we were admiring nothing more than a clever cardboard façade.
So before we decide whether something belongs in the realm of sacred, strange, misunderstood, meaningful, questionable, or freshly harvested bollocks…
Perhaps we leave the door open for a dear friend – Curiosity.
We might be surprised by what wanders through.
In Salt & Ink,
Wild Keen
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